'Superman' star Christopher Reeve no more

Reeve fell into a coma Saturday after going into cardiac arrest while at his New York home, his publicist, Wesley Combs told The Associated Press by phone from Washington, D.C., on Sunday night. His family was at his side at the time of death.

Reeve was being treated at Northern Westchester Hospital for a pressure wound, a common complication for people living with paralysis. In the past week, the wound had become severely infected, resulting in a serious systemic infection.

Reeve broke his neck in May 1995 when he was thrown from his horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Va.

Enduring months of therapy to allow him to breathe for longer and longer periods without a respirator, Reeve emerged to lobby Congress for better insurance protection against catastrophic injury and to move an Academy Award audience to tears with a call for more films about social issues.

'Hollywood needs to do more,' he said in the March 1996 Oscar awards appearance. 'Let's continue to take risks. Let's tackle the issues. In many ways our film community can do it better than anyone else. There is no challenge, artistic or otherwise, that we can't meet.'

He returned to directing, and even returned to acting in a 1998 production of Rear Window, a modern update of the Hitchcock thriller about a man in a wheelchair who becomes convinced that a neighbour has been murdered. Reeve won a Screen Actors Guild award for best actor.

His athletic frame and love of adventure made him a natural, if largely unknown, choice for the title role in the first Superman movie in 1978. He insisted on performing his own stunts. Although he reprised the role three times, Reeve often worried about being typecast as an action hero.

Though he owed his fame to it, Reeve made a concerted effort to, as he often put it, 'escape the cape'. He played an embittered, crippled Vietnam veteran in the 1980 Broadway play Fifth of July, a lovestruck time-traveler in the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time, and an aspiring playwright in the 1982 suspense thriller Deathtrap.

More recent films included John Carpenter's Village of the Damned, and the HBO movies Above Suspicion and In the Gloaming, which he directed. Among his other film credits are The Remains of the Day, The Aviator, and Morning Glory.